CALL FOR PAPERS: Sixth Annual Conference on Competition Law,Economics and Policy in South Africa

6 September 2012

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

CALL FOR PAPERS

This annual conference on competition law, economics and policy is the leading conference in South Africa at which practitioners (lawyers and economists), academics and policy analysts review cases and issues in the evolving competition jurisprudence.

There have been many developments in South African competition law over the past year, and papers are welcome on these, as well as on questions of competition law and economics more generally.

We particularly invite submissions for papers on three themes: Competition in the healthcare sector – the state and nature of competition in various healthcare sub-sectors in South Africa, its potential role and its limitations in producing optimal outcomes in private healthcare. The role of competition law and policy in the economy in light of the Constitutional Court decision/s. International developments in competition law and economics.

Those wishing to present a paper should send an abstract of no more than 250 words.

The selection of abstracts will be made by the second week of July and completed papers will be due by 13 August 2012.

Conference registration

General delegates will need to register by 13 August with Julie.Dunsford@wits.ac.za A conference registration fee of ZAR500 per general delegate is payable (10% discount for group of 3 or more delegates from the same organisation). Invited speakers and selected presenters, chairs and discussants will be registered on a complimentary basis.

ABSTRACT: In March 2011, the U.K. Government Department for Business, Innovation and Skills ("BIS") consulted upon proposed reforms to the U.K. competition regime. The reforms proposed in the Consultation generated a great deal of interest primarily because certain of them had the potential to represent a step change in the regime (e.g., one of the proposals was to change to a prosecutorial model of antitrust enforcement). Following the Consultation, BIS decided to progress a more modest set of reforms (e.g., BIS chose to retain the administrative model of antitrust enforcement). Even the most high-profile reform, the merger of the Office of Fair Trading ("OFT") and the Competition Commission into a single Competition and Markets Authority ("CMA"), is unlikely to change much in practice, given that it will ostensibly be structured so as to ensure no change to the fundamental way in which decisions are made.

While little may have changed for businesses, the Government's reforms could have more significant repercussions for individuals. The removal of the dishonesty element from Section 188 of the Enterprise Act 2002 (the "cartel offense") has the potential significantly to change the nature of the criminal cartel regime because it seems to lower the threshold for a successful conviction. This article examines the basis for reform, analyzes whether the decisions adopted in BIS's Response are likely to have their desired impact, and considers a possible alternative for legislation

ABSTRACT: In March 2012, the U.K. Government published its Response to a consultation on options for reform of the competition regime issued one year earlier, on March 16, 2011. The Foreword to the Response presents the proposed changes as "far-reaching reforms, aiming at creating a competition regime that delivers better outcomes for business, consumers and the economy." In fact, many of the proposals may be described as a desirable "tidy-up" of the system, addressing practical problems that have arisen in the past decade or so.

One change, however, stands out as a deserving the description as a "far-reaching" reform: the merger between the Office of Fair Trading ("OFT") and the Competition Commission into a newly established Competition and Markets Authority ("CMA"). The CMA will combine the functions of the OFT and the Competition Commission. Such a change is certainly significant in the United Kingdom, where business and the legal profession are used to a structural separation model in mergers and market inquiries. Under the current system, the OFT, if a certain threshold is met, refers a merger or a market to the Competition Commission, which is responsible for the final decision.

The perceived benefits of the current system are many but, on the whole, they can be boiled down to two: (1) clear independence of the decision-maker from the "prosecutor," which dispels any suspicion of bias and provides a "fresh pair of eyes" in complex cases; and (2) high quality of decision-making, given that the Competition Commission is structured in such a way as to be able to draw on significant expertise and focus its resources on phase 2 investigations without any other conflicting calls on its priorities.

ABSTRACT: This paper deals with the (formal) oral hearing in competition proceedings conducted by the European Commission for the enforcement of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU (antitrust proceedings) and under the EU Merger Regulation (merger proceedings). It analyses the legal basis and the nature and purpose of the oral hearing, examines who can request an oral hearing, and who can attend and speak at the oral hearing, compares the oral hearing with state of play meetings, and provides some general observations as to what factors may make addressees of a statement of objections decide in favour or against requesting an oral hearing.

ABSTRACT: In five recent cases involving the acquisitions of European companies by Chinese state-owned enterprises, the European Commission has delved deeply into the relationship between Chinese state-owned enterprises and the wider Chinese State. A common issue in these cases was: did the notifying state-owned enterprise operate independently of the Chinese State or was there scope for the Chinese State to coordinate the behaviour of the notifying enterprise and other state-owned enterprises in the same sector and should they therefore be treated as part of a single entity for the purpose of merger analysis?

To provide an in-depth analysis of this issue, this article first reviews the historical development of the reform of state-owned enterprises and examines their current corporate governance structure. By applying the economic theory of the firm to understanding the concept of undertaking under the EU Merger Regulation, this article reveals the flaws in the European Commission's analysis of this issue. As the single entity theory can be used as both a shield and a sword, the European Commission’s decision on this issue will have far reaching implications for future antitrust cases involving Chinese state-owned enterprises.

ABSTRACT: In this chapter from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Antitrust Economics (Roger D. Blair & D. Daniel Sokol eds. 2012), I argue that antitrust can play a limited but non-negligible role in fostering innovation in three principal ways. First, and as a general matter, antitrust promotes innovation when it performs its traditional role of penalizing practices such as horizontal price fixing and other anticompetitive practices that offer no plausible procompetitive justification, even when such practices happen to involve intellectual property rights (IPRs). As a general matter, in other words, antitrust should avoid IP exceptionalism. Second, however, in some limited contexts, antitrust should deviate from this general standard by showing greater leniency toward joint conduct, for example on the part of standard setting organization members, that is intended to make new technology more widely available. Third, in yet more limited contexts, antitrust should deviate from the general standard in the opposite direction, by playing a more aggressive role in circumstances in which the conduct at issue poses even an objectively small risk to future innovation, if that risk (should it come to pass) threatens substantial social harm, and decisionmakers can be confident that the potential procompetitive benefits of tolerating the conduct at issue are only modest. For the most part, however, to the extent patent and other IP laws are perceived as conferring excessive protection or otherwise as undermining, rather than advancing, their stated purpose of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, reform must come from the IP side, not the antitrust side. Antitrust’s role in promoting innovation is important but nevertheless constrained by the limited reach of the statute and by courts’ competence to second-guess legislative judgments about the appropriate scope of IPRs.

ABSTRACT: The focus on good institutional design, as an important component of strong competition policy and enforcement, has become a priority of antitrust agencies around the globe. Both the "external design" of the agency, i.e. the place the authority occupies in the administrative structure of a state and the "internal design," i.e. the system and procedures for antitrust enforcement and for the development of competition advocacy have been the subject of deliberation among trans-governmental participants in networks (i.e. the ICN, the ECN, and the OECD). In the research community, the work of industrial organization and developmental economists on the relationship between competition and productivity growth has been further enriched by the recognition that institutions and their performance also affect society's ability to generate economic growth. The U.K. competition regime is widely perceived as one of the best in the world and could not remain inattentive to calls for growth, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Improvements in its institutional performance and the level and length of decision-making were envisaged as fundamental to the Government's strategy to support the recovery of the economy and the country's prosperity. Following a lengthy consultation process, the Government decided to go down the path of institutional reform, by announcing the merger of the two principal U.K. competition authorities, i.e. the Office of Fair Trading ("OFT") and the Competition Commission ("CC"), into a single Competition and Markets Authority ("CMA"), to be fully operational by April 2014. Changes are being introduced also to each of the regimes for antitrust, mergers, and markets, aiming to improve the robustness of decisions and to streamline the regime.

Such radical institutional changes are hard to accomplish. Partly because institutions are path dependent, and partly because any change in the status quo involves costs, actors are not attracted to an alternative institutional arrangement, even if it may provide higher aggregate returns in the long run. Furthermore, because "institutions work in complex ways akin to an ecosystem," interference in the operation of one body may affect the working of another body. Nevertheless, it will be shown that the proposed merger is not followed, at least at this stage, by profound changes in the decision-making process of the two institutions; a fact that mitigates the risk of externalities to the judicial bodies of the U.K.'s competition landscape. Overall, the institutional reform falls short of the expectations of a watershed event, rather suggesting the symbiosis of the two authorities under a single roof.

Given the breadth of the developments we will not discuss each of them in detail, but rather concentrate on certain features of the CMA, which may render the symbiosis and interaction with other bodies of the U.K.'s competition ecosystem less harmonious.

ABSTRACT: In this article we introduce the abuse of dominance provisions in China’s Anti-monopoly Law (AML) that was enacted in 2007, and we put this in context by briefly describing the laws on the abuse of dominance that existed before the AML, and their relationship with the provisions in the AML. We then discuss the interpretation and enforcement of the AML’s abuse of dominance provisions; on the one hand generally in the context of China’s new market competition environment and its political-legal system, and on the other hand specifically through a consideration of some recent antitrust cases on the abuse of market dominance. Finally, we offer a preliminary appraisal of the law and its enforcement.

ABSTRACT: We exploit the deregulation of interstate bank branching laws to test whether banking competition affects corporate innovation. We find robust evidence that banking competition in corporations’ headquarter states causes corporations to produce fewer patents and patents with fewer citations. One explanation for this negative relation is that banking competition could enable small, innovative firms to secure bank financing at a lower cost instead of being acquired by corporations. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find evidence that banking competition reduces the supply of innovative targets, generating an apparent reduction in corporate innovation. Overall, these results uncover a surprising effect of banking competition and shed light on the determinants of corporate innovation.

ABSTRACT: How important is procedural fairness and transparency in competition enforcement proceedings to ensuring citizens’ confidence and belief in a fair and legal system and in those applying the law? What benefits arise for enforcement agencies from a fairer and more transparent enforcement process? The OECD published on Monday 30 April 2012 its Key Points on Procedural Fairness and Transparency, a publication which summarises three roundtable discussions held on the topic during 2010 and 2011. This publication, which includes an introduction to the topic by Sharis A. Pozen as well as the executive summaries, and summaries of the discussion of the roundtables, is available here.

ABSTRACT: This paper puts forward an alternative path, next to regulatory competition models and comparative law endeavors, called legal emulation. Regulatory competition suffers from its very restrictive assumptions, which make it a relatively rare occurrence in practice. It is also endogenously driven, ignoring legal change brought about from within the law, and it takes an impoverished view of law. As for comparative law, it has tended to remain mostly mono-disciplinary. It usually lacks a dynamic dimension. Legal emulation tries to combine the more dynamic perspective of regulatory competition, with the endogeneity of comparative law. It rests on a theoretical perspective whereby the law is conceived as the outcome of a series of choices – substantive or institutional, fundamental or transient – made between different options (legal science would then be the investigation of the set of those choices). The paper provides an outline of the legal emulation model. Legal emulation ties together and explains a number of existing phenomena in many legal orders, such as constitutional, EU or human rights review; impact assessment; peer review within networks of authorities; or the open method of coordination. Finally, the paper outlines some consequences of adopting a legal emulation model.

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ABSTRACT: Traditionally in competition law, vertical arrangements (where parties to the transaction or agreement in question are active up and downstream of each other) are normally subject to a lower level of scrutiny compared with horizontal arrangements. Some jurisdictions have even taken the policy decision not to subject vertical arrangements to the reach of competition law. For instance, the United Kingdom until recently had in place an exemption for vertical agreements. This approach is also proposed under the hotly anticipated Hong Kong Competition Bill. The position in China is, however, different. Under the Chinese Anti-monopoly Law (“AML”), the legislation expressly seeks to regulate agreements involving undertakings operating at different levels of the value chain, and this is reinforced in regulatory guidance. The merger control provisions make no distinction as to horizontal, vertical or conglomerate mergers, and in practice, the Ministry of Commerce (“MOFCOM”) has indeed imposed remedies in two cases involving vertical mergers.

This article summarizes the extent to which vertical arrangements have been scrutinized by antitrust regulators, and instances where they have been challenged in the private sphere.

I want to just clarify the two aspects of Google critics' search neutrality arguments.

First, some suggest Google does or could demote the search placement of particular companies. Mark Patterson asks us to speculate that Google might deliberately decide to demote particular sites. Foundem in the UK claims that Google "punished" Foundem in search rankings because Foundem competes with Google. (As noted in our conference paper, some point out that Foundem had won some awards, others have responded that Foundem is evidently a spammy site that does not follow basic search engine optimization.) Patterson suggests we need to see Google's algorithm because perhaps Google engineers might target a site.

Second, some criticize Google's move, in 2007, from ten blue links on a display page to displaying results in a "universal search" display that includes results from Google News, Google Maps, Google Places, and Google Travel. Google claims that it can better organize results for users and attempt to compete and do search better than competitors; competitors argue that Google is advantaging its specialized properties through dominating general search.

The disclosure remedies might be the most sensible of all those proposed, but they are based primarily on conjecture. Regarding the "demoting" of sites, there is very little evidence that Google actually does this. Foundem is the main example--and Google rebuts that minimal evidence with the credible argument that Foundem is not worthy of better placement. Patterson, in his thoughtful summary post, merely proposes a hypothetical, rather than marshaling any real evidence. Regarding the "promotion" of Google Travel and Google News and Google Maps, disclosure has no effect because nothing is hidden. Everyone can see that Google has moved to "universal search"--and that so has Microsoft's Bing. Google can credibly argue that it has a pro-consumer reason for the four-year old change, but nobody can credibly argue that Google is hiding the fact.

Even if Google engineers were targeting Foundem, the government's ability to define a search neutrality standard (see Grimmelmann) and to implement the remedy (see my paper with Luke Pelican) make me skeptical that the remedies proposed so far, beyond the disclosure resting on conjecture, would actually further consumer welfare, competition, and innovation in search.

ABSTRACT: The challenges and questions surrounding the design of a competition system are part of an identifiable life cycle that characterizes the development of a competition agency. The core challenges are to set priorities and execute them, but there are various potential obstacles. This article looks at the FTC’s experiences in its first decade, a period bringing extraordinary technological dynamism that reshaped the U.S. economy and transitions in political leadership, to shed light on how a new or reformed agency might go about facing predictable problems in its first years and to suggest how these agencies can improve their effectiveness.

New institutions like the FTC are shaped by the socio-political context that leads to their formation. Interested parties had multiple conceptions about the FTC’s purpose and differing expectations as to its use when the FTC was formed. Law enabling competition systems generally embodies a mix of objectives and policy aims that the new agency must reconcile. Some of the most daunting tasks for the leadership of these institutions is to identify the multiple policy impulses that brought the agency to life; to assess the relative intensity and importance of individual ideas; and to formulate a program that is coherent, faithful to its original aims, and adaptable to political and intellectual changes. External stakeholders who impose demands on new agencies and political transitions complicate these tasks.

The FTC was in some ways poorly organized to meet the challenges of its first decade due to its lack of centralized leadership and small staff. However, it still addressed tough issues in the emerging economies of the 1920s, in part by establishing many of its critical elements. First, the development of an administrative adjudication process helped make the FTC an influential competition policy tribunal. Also, the completion of studies examining competitive conditions in one or more industries was part of the FTC’s broad program to address competitive problems and led to FTC litigation, referrals to the Department of Justice, and legislative proposals. A final element was outreach through the introduction of “trade practice submittal,” which permitted the FTC to meet representatives of industries and formulate rules that formally expressed judgment on the industry.

In part because it was stretched too thin by its inability to set priorities and it faced a hostile judiciary, the FTC often failed to implement its plans for a successful enforcement program. Its problems were compounded by inadequate articulation of the rationales for its early orders and for its decision not to prosecute. The FTC’s challenges in setting priorities and executing its goals in the face of early challenges may serve as a cautionary lesson for other new agencies.

I enjoyed the entries in this symposium and learned something from each of them. I have a few things to say in response to both Frank Pasquale and Eric Clemons and their sweeping indictments of not just Google but seemingly the entire modern information economy.

Everywhere they look, it seems, Pasquale and Clemons see villainy. Someone completely alien to the modern online ecosystem would read Pasquale’s description of it -- “digital feudalism,” “absolute sovereignty,” “opaque technologies,” “leaving users in the dark,” etc., etc. -- and likely conclude that a catastrophe had befallen modern man. Of course, Pasquale’s narrative is missing any reference to the unparalleled expansion in the stock of knowledge and human choices that has been made possible by Google and the others companies he castigates (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon). Meanwhile, Clemons wants to group Google in with supposed Wall Street robber barons as well as characters from Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”It’s all a bit much.

Regardless, what about those high-tech feudal lords, especially Google? Can we keep their market power in check without extreme steps? It goes without saying that neither Pasquale nor Clemons places much faith in the sort of dynamic, disruptive competition and creative destruction (which I documented in my entry in the symposium) as being an effective check on market behavior. But their skepticism goes well beyond that and transcends tradition antitrust analysis. They seem to assert that we just can’t trust large digital intermediaries at all, primarily because they are profit-maximizers. Clemons suggests that paid search shouldn’t even be permitted, which is a bit like saying ad-supported, for-profit newspapers should have been forbidden or regulated long ago.

Their skepticism about concentrated power fades quickly, however, when it’s the concentrated power of government that will be calling the shots in the digital economy. Regulators, Pasquale says, will be able to devise forms of redress that “help[] us confront issues of discrimination, malfeasance, nonfeasance, and technological due process in a rapidly changing online environment.” He suggests transparency mandates, external regulatory oversight, and that something akin to a mandatory right of reply for search results are all needed. Meanwhile, Clemons wants full-blown structural separation of Google into three or four different firms.

Pasquale and Clemons don’t bother addressing the trade-offs associated with their proposals. They apparently want us to imagine that these proposed remedies are innocuous and costless. They also don’t seem to give much weight to the critiques set forth by Marvin Ammori, James Grimmelman, or Dan Crane regarding the incoherent and potentially counter-productive nature of “search neutrality” remedies. Clemons also doesn’t seem at all worried about the forgone benefits of vertical integration, even though those benefits can be substantial in the field of search. The rich content and specialized integrated services that Google has been able to freely offer consumers deserve greater consideration before imposing the nuclear option of structural separation.

That last point is essential. We can’t divorce this discussion from the real-world evidence of just how well consumers have been served by the search market today. That begins with the fact that consumers don’t pay a penny for the cornucopia of content or expanding universe of constantly innovating services that they enjoy currently. So, to repeat what I said in my initial entry, the traditional goals of public utility regulation -- universal service, price competition, and quality service -- are already being achieved quite nicely without intervention. That makes the case for search regulation even harder to sustain.

Finally, let’s just talk about the practicality of all the regulation they advocate. Pasquale asks: “Is it too much to ask for some entity outside Google to be able to ‘look under the hood’ and understand what is going on in plausibly contested scenarios?” Well, perhaps it is! The respected blog SearchEngineLand has estimated that approximately 34,000 searches are conducted per second(or 2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month). That’s a lot of activity for regulators to keep tabs on.And Google’s search algorithm is constantly being tweaked-- more than 500 changes each year -- to offer websurfers improved results and enhanced security against spammers and other malicious activity. Having regulators constantly “looking under the hood” and trying to adjust those results via a political process would likely slow innovation to a crawl. It would also open up the process to a great deal of gaming by other parties -- including spammers and scammers. Moreover, the dangers of political gaming of search should not be discounted. Once policymakers have the sort of authority over search that Pasquale and Clemons recommend, the danger of political influence and regulatory shenanigans both grow exponentially.

In the end, I believe the combination of public pressure, social norms and, most importantly, ongoing innovation and creative destruction, can do a better job of protecting consumer welfare than the sort of sweeping regulatory interventions that Pasquale and Clemons advocate. We should be patient and see how this marketplace develops instead of engaging in rash interventions.

ABSTRACT: Our study extends the empirical literature on whether vertical restraints are anticompetitive. We focus on exclusive contracting in platform markets, which feature indirect network effects and thus are susceptible to an applications barrier to entry. Exclusive contracts in vertical relationships between the platform provider and software supplier can heighten entry barriers. We test these theories in the home video game market. We find that indirect network effects from software on hardware demand are present, and that exclusivity takes market share from rivals, but only when most games are nonexclusive. The marginal exclusive game contributes virtually nothing to console demand. Thus, allowing exclusive vertical contracts in platform markets need not lead to domination by one system protected by a hedge of complementary software. Our investigation suggests that bargaining power enjoyed by the best software providers and the skewed distribution of game revenue prevents the foreclosure of rivals through exclusive contracting.

Much of the disagreement in this blog symposium seems to arise from different assumptions regarding what Google might have done. Is the concern merely that Google has provided “non-neutral” results, but in a way that can be defended as at least intended to serve users (James Grimmelmann, Daniel Crane, Eugene Volokh)? Or is it that some of Google’s search results might be altered purely to gain a competitive advantage (Frank Pasquale, Allen Grunes, Mark Patterson)? The recent actions by the agencies in the U.S. and the EU suggest that they, at least, think the concerns are serious.

Suppose, sharpening the hypotheticals of Pasquale and Grunes, that behind Google’s closed doors, its search engineers said things like “Yes, I know site A is better, but we’ll downgrade it because it’s becoming a potential threat to us.”

This hypothetical is worth considering because Google’s search decisions are made behind its closed doors. For that reason, it’s easy to assume that it doesn’t make them for anticompetitive reasons. And maybe it doesn’t. But unlike other antitrust exclusion cases, where refusals to deal and exclusive contracts take place in public markets, exclusion by Google would never come to light without an investigation. In this respect, it’s interesting that for its Google inquiry the FTC has hired Beth Wilkinson, an attorney with experience in internal corporate investigations.

Some of the contributors to this symposium (Adam Thierer, Marvin Ammori, Mark Jamison) suggest that anticompetitive actions by Google would be constrained by competition. But what if, as Patterson suggests might be possible, another Google engineer responded to the statement above with “OK, but don’t downgrade site A so much that it will be obvious. Just do it enough to hurt.”

It seems to me that these facts, if they were real, could make out an antitrust violation. The conduct would be exclusionary, it would be anticompetitive in the sense that consumers would be injured (even if they didn’t know it), and it would lack a legitimate business justification.

But what about the First Amendment? I’m not sure that Eugene Volokh believes that downgrading results as this hypothetical suggests would be protected speech, given that he relies on the assumption, which would be false on these hypothetical facts, that search engines “aim[]to give users what the search engine companies see as the most helpful and useful information.” Regardless, I’m confident that antitrust courts would have no trouble with the First Amendment on those facts. The white paper by Volokh and Donald Falk appears to concede that if speech is not the exercise of editorial judgment, then antitrust can step in, as in Lorain Journal (and in other cases not mentioned in the white paper, like Providence Journal and the cases arising from the AMA’s campaign against chiropractors).

It’s true, of course, that a case against Google, even on the facts hypothesized here, would be challenging. Whether such conduct would be sufficiently exclusionary to bring Sherman Act § 2 or Article 102 TFEU into play is a difficult question (Marino Lao, Ammori). Devising remedies would be problematic (Pasquale, Patterson, Eric Clemons). And more ambiguous conduct might not be illegal (Grimmelmann, Crane, Thierer).

In the end, though, it seems that given how little we know about what goes on behind those closed doors at Google and given that recent events give us little reason to trust it, it is worth considering how antitrust might respond to anticompetitive conduct. It’s remarkable to see scholars dismissing antitrust concerns without even knowing what facts the investigations will reveal.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a statistical study of public antitrust enforcement in developing countries. It illustrates what really happens with antitrust laws in developing countries after they are put into force. Counter to predictions predominant in the literature, this research shows that developing countries do enforce their antitrust laws with a trend to increase enforcement over time. This disqualifies arguments that developing countries only adopt antitrust laws to signal compliance to donor institutions and to secure trade deals with no real intention to enforce these adopted legislations. It also shows that collecting enforcement data for developing countries is a practicable undertaking. The paper puts together an original dataset that can be complemented and refined by researchers interested in studying actual antitrust enforcement instead of relying on ready-made proxies. In this research 20 antitrust enforcement variables for 50 developing countries over a mean period of 10 years were collected. The data presented here also allows an in-depth look at the activities of antitrust authorities across developing countries. It highlights activities particular to developing countries’ antitrust enforcement, it shows in detail what activities are performed at these public authorities and allows an observation of the varying intensities of enforcement not only across countries but also within the same country. With the help of this dataset the relationship between the enforcement data collected in this research and the ready-made proxies frequently used to measure antitrust enforcement in developing countries is analyzed. The results show that many of these widespread measurements are not associated with the different aspects of the enforcement process.

ABSTRACT: I focus in this paper on institutional change and decision making in the new CMA. There are also other important changes to U.K. competition law, including the removal of "dishonesty" as a requirement for the criminal offense in cartels-it will be replaced by appropriate publication of detailed arrangements as a defense. This, and numerous other relatively small modifications, typically move competition policy in the right direction. Another example is that the primary duty of the CMA will be "to promote effective competition in markets, across the UK economy, for the benefits of consumers." This is a very positive and clear mission statement. But to understand the potential effectiveness of the CMA, we need to understand the organizations that are being merged. The CC and OFT are very different animals.